Yale is making a slight change to its low-income loan forgiveness program, and it’s going to make it a little harder for people who leave Yale Law School and take low-paying jobs.
Now, this isn’t anything to yell and scream about. Yale is still committed to making loan repayment feasible for people who don’t take the Biglaw money and run. And they still have one of the most generous programs in the country.
But the program is getting a little less generous. Which isn’t a great sign about the long-term ability of lawyers who have the financial flexibility to service poor or working-class clients….
Continue reading “Yale Law School Makes It Slightly Harder to Get Loan Forgiveness”
We’re still waiting to see if the lawsuits marshaled against law schools over their questionable employment statistics will have any effect. Obviously schools are misleading people about the employment outcomes of recent graduates — notice that the law schools aren’t even arguing that they give students an accurate picture. They just say their numbers shenanigans conform to the pathetic guidance laid down by the American Bar Association. But it’s still an open question whether this employment obfuscation will be legally actionable.
Basically, nobody cares if law schools lie to potential students.
But if the credit ratings agencies feel they’ve been lied to, that might be a whole different kind of problem…
Continue reading “Will Sued Law Schools Take A Hit To Their Credit Ratings?”
In case you haven’t noticed, 2012 is going to be the year where I try to take a more critical look at the level of career service that law students are receiving from their law schools. The legal job market has been crappy for a long enough time that law schools and career service officers should have adjusted their game plan. Rolling into 2012 with 2007 career service programs is simply unacceptable.
A couple of days ago, I offered some networking advice to the functional alcoholics in the audience. Sure, my thoughts were a little bit outside the box, but they were better than the kind of standard networking tripe most law students get from their overmatched CSO administrators.
Case in point, take a look as some networking advice sent around by the Dean of Students at a New York-area law school just last week. The advice was perfect if the dean was trying to ensure that the students made no impression, and left all employers wondering why they bothered to show up for a silly networking event in the first place….
Continue reading “Dean of Students Gets Networking Advice All Wrong”
Beyoncé
* “All My Justices” may soon be coming to daytime television station near you. In a close vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that calls for television access to Supreme Court proceedings. [Legal Times]
* A former Cravath associate’s law license has been suspended as a result of a DV assault charge. For every day spring bonuses go unannounced, another CSM attorney will do something to embarrass the firm. [Am Law Daily]
* Duncan Law wants wants a judge to reconsider an injunction, claiming “eight students have withdrawn” since its accreditation was denied. In other news, only eight students at Duncan Law have half a brain. [National Law Journal]
* If you liked it, then you should’ve put a trademark on it. Jay-Z and Beyoncé have filed a trademark application for their daughter’s name. Nothing says love like exploitation. [New York Post]
* Remember the siblings involved in a nationwide manhunt last summer? Stripper and bank robber extraordinaire Lee Grace Dougherty pleaded guilty, and now faces up to 28 years in jail. [New York Daily News]
...to take a survey
Later this year, Above the Law will be launching a new, expanded Career Center. The new Career Center will be a resource for students and lawyers at all stages of their careers, and in all areas of legal practice (i.e., not just Biglaw). But we can be sure that news and insight into life at firms and schools will continue to be ATL’s bread and butter. With that in mind, today we open up the ATL School & Firm Insider Survey.
I assume a common reaction will be, “What with — among others — Vault, Chambers, U.S. News, and Am Law, why the hell do we need yet another employer/school survey?” Fair enough. And yes, all of the existing surveys have their merits. All of them produce useful content for students and potential laterals.
We do believe, however, that when it comes to information, the more the merrier. Moreover, the ATL survey is distinctive in some fundamental ways, and we’re going to justify its existence….
Continue reading “Finally… A Survey for Lawyers and Law Students!”
Max Schrems, a 24-year-old law student from Austria, has become one of Facebook's fiercest critics.
While most law students are shaking off the winter break and settling back in for the second semester, Max Schrems is busy doing his best to bring Facebook to its knees.
Last year, the 24-year-old University of Vienna law student spent a semester abroad at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. His privacy law professor there, Dorothy Glancy, invited a privacy lawyer from Facebook to be eaten alive by speak to the class. Schrems was shocked by the lawyer’s limited grasp of the severity of European data protection laws, and decided to write his final paper for the class on how Facebook was flunking privacy in Europe.
In the course of his research, he discovered that Facebook’s dossiers on individual users are hundreds of pages long, and include information users thought had been deleted. When he returned to Austria last summer, he formed an activist group called Europe v. Facebook (to legitimize his campaign and make it seem like more than just one law student), filed dozens of complaints in Europe about Facebook’s data practices, and publicized his findings online, leading to widespread media attention, a probe by a European privacy regulator, and questions from Congress.
On Monday, Facebook’s European director of policy (and former MP) Richard Allan and another California-based Facebook exec flew to Vienna to meet with Schrems for a whopping six hours to discuss his concerns.
Continue reading at Forbes.com….
I didn't do well in the classroom, so I'm going to the courtroom.
At least once a month, something happens that makes millennials seem insufferable. It’s like we’ve bred an entire generation of people who can’t take criticism. It’s an entire generation that hasn’t watched the Godfather and doesn’t understand the phrase “it’s business, not personal.” When they fail, they don’t redouble their efforts; instead, they get their feelings hurt, make excuses, and whine and complain to anyone who will listen.
So it is with some pathetic millennials from the Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Two students at the school received crappy grades. This is going to come as a huge shock to some of you out there, but it turns out that going to a lower ranked law school with the expectation that you’ll get a job if you finish in the top ten percent of the class doesn’t work out for 90% of the students.
Other people get bad grades and re-dedicate themselves to study, or (gasp) figure out something to do that they are actually good at. These kids, well, you can’t say that millennials are ashamed of being whiny bitches….
Continue reading “Law Students Sue School Over Being Graded on a Curve”
Is it right for a law school to send its students to tolerance camp? Mandatory tolerance camp? Mandatory tolerance camp, where unexcused absences will result in an intolerant notation placed in students’ permanent records?
When I came across the story of a state law school holding a “mandatory” diversity seminar that students were required to attend, my first instinct was to side with the students who objected to the required nature of the program. Generally, I’m not a fan of forcing people to be nice to each other, and you can’t force a man to change what’s in his heart. If students want to be racist or prejudiced to others in their community, that’s something that may demand an institutional response. But if some kids don’t think they’ll benefit much from “diversity training,” whatever that means, so be it.
But when the ABA’s committee on accreditation is telling law school administrators that the student body needs to work on its racial sensitivity, well, you can see how the law school is in a bit of a bind…
Continue reading “Can A Law School Force You To Be Racially Sensitive?”
Yesterday, my colleague Staci Zaretsky decided to make the case for why all the people who are dutifully paying off their law school debts should feel superior to those who default on their law school debts, or seek to discharge them through bankruptcy. As she wrote in her post, “Have I ever thought about filing for bankruptcy? Hell no. It might be hard, but I’m accepting responsibility for my actions. I’m paying back what I owe — slowly but surely, with not a single missed payment.”
Well, la, de, f***ing, da. It’s all well and good that Staci has never ever thought about availing herself of a financial protection that is readily used by rich people (and companies) should they make a ruinous financial investment. I’m also really happy that Staci apparently knew everything about what she was getting into before she decided to go into a whole lot of debt to the Western New England University School of Law.
But I’m sticking to the point that most people in their early 20s have no clue about what getting into six figures of educational debt will do to the rest of their lives. I still think that absent parental support of any kind, people in over their heads in debt should be able to file for normal bankruptcy without needing to show undue hardship.
The story shouldn’t be about students looking for an “easy” way out of their obligations. The story should be about helping 22-year-olds fully understand what they are getting into, and looking at all the options available for people to get out of horrible financial mistakes of the past….
Continue reading “There’s No Easy Way Out Of Student Debt, But That Doesn’t Stop Some People From Feeling Superior”
Our law student is hotter.
When you think of Oklahoma, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For some it’s a Broadway musical, for others, it’s agriculture, and for others still, it’s football. But what about beautiful, intelligent women?
Today, we’ve got a story for our readers about a law student with some really big… brains. A tipster notified us about this sexy Sooner and the double life she leads: she’s a second-year law student, but in her free time, she’s a model who’s worked at some of the finest breastaurants in the business.
Who is this lovely law student, and which law school does she attend? More importantly, what does she look like? Semi-NSFW pics, or it didn’t happen….
Continue reading “A Model Law Student: This Sexy Sooner Hits the Books Hard”
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, more and more law school graduates are trying to seek bankruptcy protection from their mountains of student loan debt. Bankruptcy? Really?
Now, we know that reading comprehension is tested on the LSAT, but apparently, once students complete the law school entrance exam, that skill goes right out the window. How do we know? Because law school graduates, who freely signed up for student loans as law students, are now trying to shirk their repayment responsibilities. They are the 99% (of people who sign on the dotted line and think nothing of it until it’s time to face the consequences).
All the documents these law school graduates signed and claimed to have read and understood prior to accepting their student loans — well, they had some words to say about bankruptcy. Important words. Here are some of them, pulled from my very own master promissory note:
We will discharge (forgive) your loan if: [y]our loan is discharged in bankruptcy. However, federal student loans are not automatically discharged if you file for bankruptcy. In order to have your loan discharged in bankruptcy, you must prove to the bankruptcy court that repaying the loan would cause undue hardship.
Aww, you think you’ve got an undue hardship, precious little snowflake? Well, think again….
Continue reading “Not Even Bankruptcy Will Make Your Student Loans Go Away”
I’ve never been a fan of U.S. News obsessing over how much money law schools spend on their facilities. I feel it artificially inflates the cost of going to law school in a digital age where so much of what you need can be found online.
But there are some things that you can’t do online. Not yet at least. Like going to the bathroom. Perhaps if Steve Jobs were still alive, the iPoop and the Waterless iPoop would be just around the corner. But we were robbed of that great man.
Maybe all you need to know about the difference between top law schools and not-so-hot law schools really does come down to toilets. At Harvard, they name them after rich alumni. At North Dakota Law School, they barely have them….
Continue reading “Adventures at Low-Ranked Law Schools: Don’t Call It a ‘Toilet,’ They Don’t Even Have Toilets”
Insert face of law school student above.
Instead of hiring a new professor to teach Cross-Cultural Comparison of Masturbatory Prohibitions, I want law schools to start paying six-figure salaries to the people they hire to work in their career services offices. I want U.S. News to include the number of CSO professionals and money spent on CSOs as data points in their law school rankings. I want deans to start asking rich alumni if they would like to donate to help fight mental disability and extreme laziness in career services offices.
Because honestly, the lack of effort put in by career services professionals at the nation’s law schools really seems to be out of hand. Maybe they’ve just been collectively beaten down by the years of terrible job prospects and the throngs of students in need of help. Maybe they believe that there really is nothing they can do, and they are significantly more worried about protecting their own jobs than finding jobs for eager law students. Maybe the lack of institutional support and respect for their efforts makes them feel like second-class citizens whenever the Professor of Impractical Studies That Serve No Clients walks into the room.
I don’t know why we’re here, but when you can’t even trust your CSO to effectively cull Simplicity to remove stupid and insulting job prospects like the ones below, it’s time to change the entire approach to law school career services….
Continue reading “Is Your Career Services Office This Lazy?”
Most law school graduates pass the bar exam with flying colors on the first try. Law schools, of course, are ecstatic when their graduates pass, because it’s something that they can brag about in their brochures. Other law school graduates aren’t so lucky — they fail, and they fail hard. But law schools don’t want you to know about the people who fail the bar exam. They’d like to shove those dirty statistics far, far away from public view.
So what happens when a law school’s graduates fail the bar exam in such great numbers that it becomes national news? Does that law school hang its head in shame and admit defeat? Or does it figure out a way to game the numbers so that next time, it won’t be so embarrassed?
As with most things having to do with numbers, this law school has allegedly made an ill-advised decision to appear more appealing to the public (and the American Bar Association). This law school is allegedly offering its students money in the hopes that they won’t take this summer’s bar exam. But which law school?
Continue reading “Which Law School Is Allegedly Paying Students Not to Take the Bar Exam This Summer?”
Hey, little boy, do you want to go to law school?
I got home from New York last night, exhausted and ready to sleep in my own bed instead of a different couch every night. I noticed a couple things as soon as I set foot into the San Francisco airport. Everyone here wears jeans. Us Californians love our casual clothes. Also, fried food and all meat products and candy are outlawed here, so we are all in excellent shape. We have and enjoy trees, and we live in apartments large enough to have closets.
For better or worse, there are a lot of things about California that make us different and drive Newt Gingrich to say he wants to shut down our region’s federal appeals court.
One of our specialties is our penchant for unaccredited law schools. Say what you will about them — there are advantages and disadvantages — but what about an online only, unaccredited law school that spams law school students who have already enrolled at other, more prestigious institutions?
Shady? Or brilliant marketing strategy? Decide for yourself, courtesy of a generous tipster….
Continue reading “What’s the Difference Between Law School Admission and Spam? Good Question”
The last time we wrote about somebody on the Emory Law faculty trying to “help out” struggling, jobless Emory Law students, we were covering the train wreck of a commencement speech by professor Sara Stadler. She told graduating law students, many of whom didn’t have a job, to “get over” their sense of entitlement.
You’d think that the Emory faculty wouldn’t risk condescending to their students again, even in the name of trying to help them. But sitting in my inbox is a series of emails from Sarah Shalf, the director of the Emory field placement program, offering students the opportunity to babysit kids and “network” at her Super Bowl party.
Condescending? For a certain point of view, absolutely. But Shalf is honestly trying to help, and she’s using her party to do more for students than Emory Law career services is really doing right now. It’s not her fault that Emory Law students are so desperate for job opportunities that babysitting at a Super Bowl party where judges and lawyers will be represents a good deal.
Such a good deal that Shalf had to devise an application process for the babysitting gig….
Continue reading “Emory Law Students Rush to Apply for Babysitting ‘Opportunity’”
Or, maybe sometimes you should.
Due to the current weakness in the job market for environmental journalists, Columbia’s dual degree program in Earth & Environmental Science Journalism will not be accepting new students for the foreseeable future.
– A note posted on the official website for Columbia University’s Dual Masters program in Earth and Environmental Science Journalism.
(I feel like I’ve heard this before, in some sort of parallel universe. More on this, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Ground Control to ABA, Are You Listening?”
As we noted yesterday, it seems like law schools are eager to sell off the naming rights to, well, just about anything that exists within their hallowed hallways. At top-tier schools like Harvard Law, they name their men’s bathrooms after notable alumni. At lower ranked law schools, however, it seems that notable law professors aren’t even worthy of a urinal cake.
Instead, they’re being treated like yesterday’s garbage. That’s right, folks, BYU Law has outdone Harvard by slapping a former professor’s name on an itsy-bitsy trash can….
Continue reading “Move Over, Harvard: BYU Law Has Got Memorial Trash Cans”
